


Fortunate Son

by nirejseki, robininthelabyrinth (nirejseki)



Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV), The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fae, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Autism, Autistic Mick Rory, Fae & Fairies, Fix-It, Gen, M/M, Mythology References
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-11
Updated: 2018-04-11
Packaged: 2019-04-21 15:56:54
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,727
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14288370
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nirejseki/pseuds/nirejseki, https://archiveofourown.org/users/nirejseki/pseuds/robininthelabyrinth
Summary: Mick's the seventh son of a seventh daughter, and he's always seen things differently than other people.His family doctor calls him autistic.His ma calls him a changeling.





	Fortunate Son

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings for people misunderstanding autism

Mick's always seen things differently than other people.

It starts when he's young, when looking at people in the eyes still hurts and overwhelms him, when he ducks his head and doesn't speak, when he cries at any change in routine, when he's unable to understand those around him and grows frustrated, when he focuses on one thing to the exclusion of all else. 

His family doctor calls him autistic.

His ma calls him a changeling. 

He's given to understand that these are much the same, in her eyes, and she assures him that she doesn't hold it against him none at all: she does miss the baby that was born to her, at least in theory, but Mick is what she has, and she loves him all the same, just the same as if he really was her boy, her seventh boy. Lord knows, she tells him with a smile, after all the trouble she had getting used to Mick, she wouldn't know what to do without him, and she wouldn't trade him in, not even for the baby she originally had. She had an aunt like him, in fact, and it was all fine; she did quite well for herself once they learned to adapt themselves to her ways. 

After all, as Mick's ma declares, _their_ family isn't foolish enough to turn angry hands against the gifts of the Gentlemen. 

She's careful to keep him away from iron, wherever she can, and loads his pockets with salt lest the Gentlemen get any bright ideas of taking what's theirs back. She gives him cotton sheets and a velvety blanket and lets him crunch leaves in his fists when he needs something to distract him. She sets a strict routine for him, which he appreciates, and often leaves him with the animals of the house: the dogs, the cat, the chickens, the goats. Even the neighbor's cows, sometimes. 

He likes them, and they like him, and that's when he first starts wondering if his mother isn't right about everything. 

When he gets a little older, he tells his ma that he's not a changeling.

"How's that, love?" she says, busy with the pots and pans on the stove.

"I don't think I'm a changeling," he says, his head still ducked down and his attention starting to wander. "I don't have the eyes for it."

"The eyes, baby?"

"Uh-huh. The eyes. Like Mr. Johanson." 

"Now that's a strange thing to say," his ma exclaims, finally turning away from cooking dinner to look at Mick. "Now tell me, what's wrong with Mr. Johanson's eyes? They're a very nice blue, if I recall."

"They're not blue," Mick objects, frowning. "Only his glasses are blue."

"He don't wear glasses, Mickey."

"Sure he does. He's gotta hide his real eyes, or no one'll talk to him none."

"And what do his real eyes look like, baby?" she says, smiling at him. She doesn't sound like she believes him. 

Mick considers the question regardless, giving it the solemnity it deserves. 

"Like teeth," he finally says, starting to rock back and forth in his chair and squeeze his fingers into fists. He wants to go hide under the big heavy blanket in his parents’ room again; that’s his favorite, even above the velvety one his ma got for him, though he likes that one too. "He's got hungry eyes, like teeth."

She frowns. "That's not a nice thing to say."

"I don't think the Gentlemen care about nice things, ma," Mick tells her. "They only tell us nice things to make sure we don't look at 'em, when the kids start to go."

"The - kids?"

Mick nods, looking at the floor. He wouldn't have known about the kids business at all, except one of the cows was being used as a temporary resting place for a child-fairy, and she was so delighted that Mick could see her that she went on a-blabbing for ages. He asked her about the eyes, and she explained about the glasses, and the eyes, and the kids. 

"Baby, has Mr. Johanson done something to you?" Mick's ma says, crouching down in front of him and ignoring the way one of the pots has started boiling behind her. "Anything he oughtn't have?"

"Oh no," Mick says. "Not to _me_. He's scared of me, and _my_ eyes. Which ain't the same type of eyes as him."

And with that important message passed along, he gets up and goes away.

His parents fight that night, ma and pa shouting when they think the kids are sleeping and not listening, with pa growling about his standing in the community and how important it is not to judge people based on fairy-tales that no one's ever proven hide nor hair of, and ma saying that it was her darling Mickey what that warned her, her changeling with his strange eyes, and if he's not no changeling then he's her seventh boy, and anyways where does he get off complaining about fairy-tales when he knows perfectly well that he trained for two months to be able to carve an apple skin off in a way that'd say his name so as to convince her to marry him?

They settle on a compromise: pa continues to talk to Mr. Johanson, but he's not invited over and ma won't take any of the kids anywhere he's at. 

(They call it a compromise, but really that just means that Mick's mother largely gets her way with some space for Mick's father to save face, and that's generally how they both like it.)

And that's where the matter stays, at least until one of the kids from the next town over disappears - runaway, no doubt, the gossip says immediately, all the adults nodding to each other in that knowing fashion adults have (Mick didn't understand it until one of his older brothers was acting as translator for what they _meant_ with all that head-shaking, but sadly said older brother was too busy t do it all the time): a bad kid from a bad family with less money than dirt that no one in town much liked, so obviously their kid would run away; who's surprised by that? 

So said all of the adults. 

All the adults, that is, but Mick's ma. 

The kid's family's desperate, putting up signs and swearing he'd never do no such thing as run away, that he's always been happy at home, but no one else in town believes them; no one but Mick's ma, who rolls up her sleeves and takes her cast-iron frypan - part of the set she inherited from her mother, and she onwards - and she marches over to Mr. Johanson's place and forces the door and finds the kid half-starved and terrified, locked up in his basement. 

And no one can find Mr. Johanson after that, neither, nor no trace that he was ever there - not in the courthouse records nor the phonebooks nor even in the dusty old house where he used to host such wonderful parties. Even the furniture that was once bright and colorful is suddenly dusty and old and looks like it's been untouched for decades.

(Everyone in town decides not to talk about it.)

"You're going to be in trouble," one of the will-o-the-wisps sings out as she dances through the forest on her travels. "The Gentlemen don't like being stymied, you know!"

Mick tells his ma that, too, when she asks him why he was sitting out in the rain staring eyes-fixed at the woods. 

Ma puts up iron on the doorway after that, and on the windows and the chimney, too. 

"It don't bother you, do it?" she asks Mick worriedly, having never quite gotten over her belief that he was a changeling. "I used small pieces where I could, but iron and tin's the best you can do against the Gentlemen."

Mick shrugs. 

He’s not talking today – it happens, sometimes, the words getting caught up in his mouth and throat. His brother sometimes tease him about it, but it’s okay because it’s only their way of being nice. They explained as much: when family teases you, they really mean to say that they like you, and anyone else who tries to get him to talk, who talks too much when Mick just needs some quiet, they punch in the face. Mick appreciates that.

Pa, though, Pa's taken to giving Mick weird looks ever since Mr. Johanson, torn between his wife's faith and his own belief that surely it's just some bizarre coincidence, and it only gets worse after Mick tells him that digging up the old wagon-wheel in the corner of the field will give him good luck with the harvest in a year where no one else has any. 

"Changeling eyes," Ma declares proudly, when they dig it up right where he says it was, and when their harvest is three times better than all their neighbors. "And a changeling of my seventh boy, no less." 

But the Gentlemen don't forget: and they always pay back their debts when they can.

They can't get to him at home, so they don't even try. 

Instead, it happens when he's at school, since there's no iron on the door or windows there. He doesn't see them slipping in through the crack in the window, nor does he feel the slide of wind across the back of his neck, and he doesn't sense them slipping in even further through a crack in the souls of the biggest of his classmates. 

He _does_ see them sitting there in his class, their ever-smiling faces hidden beneath paper masks that only _mostly_ make them look like the humans they're pretending to be. But there's nothing he can do about it, because his teacher hates him for being slow and backward and not knowing how to read the right way even after he's taught him six times, and also because he says Mick's habit of not looking him in the eye's disrespectful.

That's why the teacher doesn't pay attention when they gather around Mick and shove him around. Probably that's why he doesn't come looking for him when Mick doesn't show back up for class, locked up in a freezing cold meat locker deep in the bowels of the building. That, or maybe he believes the whole rot about being able to burn out a changeling in an oven or a freezer – but whatever it is that he thinks, it doesn't change what he does, and what he does is that he doesn’t bother telling anyone about where Mick is.

But Mick's ma doesn't see her baby come home on time, her seventh son with his changeling eyes and his anxiety issues and his fondness for a schedule, and she doesn't do nothing. No, she marches herself right to the school and demands to know the last place he was seen, fire blazing in her eyes, and she probably would've been willing to march herself right into the Underhill if that'd been what it takes to get Mick back, but she didn't have to because just as she was hollering at his teacher, one of the janitors found Mick nearly dead from cold, his fingers burned from the matches he kept lighting. 

That teacher loses his job the next day. Mick's ma muttered for days that he ought to be glad he didn't lose any body parts he valued highly, on account of her being too busy taking care of Mick to really tear into him the way she wanted to, with Mick's pa laughing (he doesn't do that much anymore, now that he's come back from the war) and saying that he never doubted that she would and maybe it wasn't so bad as all that, being as she might have to go to prison otherwise. 

Mick appreciates being saved, but sometimes wishes that his ma wasn't quite so very forthright about it the way she always was.

After all, for all that Mick didn't like him, the teacher had been a very popular teacher, charming and pretty easy-going about homework, and the other kids didn't much appreciate him being fired and replaced with someone much stricter, even if they mostly admitted it wasn't _really_ Mick's fault. 

They still blamed him for it.

It's not like he really had any friends in that school anyhow, though, and his siblings at least do right by him, closing ranks around their weird changeling brother and get into punch-up after punch-up over it to defend him, so it is what it is and Mick accept it.

But that's also when he starts lighting fires.

It's a compulsion in him, a curse left behind in the event he survived the faeries' trap, or so his ma claims. He doesn't think that's the case - the doc says it's the anxiety that comes with everything else he's got, only that it got transmuted by his terror and the matches into a fixation, and that sounds a bit more right to him - but either way, he's as helpless before it as a kitten. Fire sings his name: when he's without it, his fingers hurt in memory of it; when he gives in and lights it, the pressure lifts from his racing heart and he is filled with joy; when he stares into its depths, he sees further and farther than he's ever seen before. 

Looking at the flames the way he does, intent and absorbed until he forgets the world around him, makes him feel at peace. 

"If it's a curse like your ma always says, why don't you go break it?" Mick's pa asks one night in an angry growl. He's in his chair again, another of the too-many bottle of beer in one hand and cigarette in the other; he's had a bad night, dreaming of things that happened to him - or that he happened to do to others - during the War, and the lack of sleep makes him ornery and quarrelsome and cruel. 

There's a hag that sleeps on his chest on those nights, drinking in his pain and miring him in sorrow, and Mick doesn't know what to do about that. 

"Not like that," Mick mutters, squishing his favorite ball 'tween his fingers. It makes a goopy feeling when he does, and he likes that; it does something nice to his head. Not quite as good as the way fire does, but nice nonetheless.

"So you don't believe your ma either, huh?" Pa sneers, fighting mean and halfway to drunk, but he takes another swig of the beer like he thinks it'll help him the way Mick's ball and his lighter help him. 

Mick thinks about it. "I think you're both right," he finally says, answering the question he was asked even though he knows there's a chance that his dad meant it to be rhetorical - he's not very good at telling. "Different ways of looking at the same thing, I guess. It ain't always a curse that sets your brain off pumping the wrong sort of fuel at the wrong times, and sometimes it is, but either way the effect's much the same, and you still gotta deal with it. I heard from someone that there’s a doctor that looks into both -" 

"Yeah, right," Pa says, interrupting the way he always does if he thinks Mick’s about to go on a subject-specific ramble, which Mick wasn’t. He thinks. "She can't be right. After all, if it's a curse, it can be broken, right?"

There _is_ a way to break curses: a kelpie colt hiding among the weeds of the local pool to practice its luring told Mick in exchange for him keeping mum about it being there since it wasn't really supposed to be outside. It told Mick with misery that it seemed to it like every grown-up seemed to know what they were about with the luring and the yielding and the capturing of humans, and all without a lick of prior attempts and failures, and it was worried it wouldn't be able to keep up, so Mick took pity on it and promised he wouldn't say a word, and also that he'd keep other people away, which was really for their good as well. 

But the curse-breaking method can only be used once by any person, whether on themselves or someone else: the rocks will close after that, the mound suspicious of insatiable humans.

If Mick goes through the rocks to break his own curse, then he won't be able to break nobody else's.

Mick looks at his pa's hands, with the beer and the cigarette and sometimes also the fist and the open palm, and he knows they're going to get into a fight with Mick's ma later. He doesn't doubt that his pa loves his ma, but sometimes he lashes out and that's not good, and for all that Mick's ma can handle herself just fine, Mick thinks that he doesn't like it. He thinks that it's wrong, and that it ought to be stopped, and he thinks he knows how to stop it.

"Come with me tomorrow," Mick says to his da. "At midnight, and I'll show you."

Mick's pa laughs, because he doesn't believe him, but Mick persists and even looks him in the eyes, forcing it despite everything in him hating to do it, and in the end his pa agrees. 

And so they go, hand in hand, and so they come back, and sure enough it don't fix everything: his dad's still got what some people call shell shock and what docs are calling PTSD, his brain still all muddled and his disposition still violent, but the hag's gone for good and his dad can sleep through the night more often than not now. He's less angry, and he's less violent, and he apologizes for all the wrongs he ever did to Mick's ma and he _means_ it this time.

"You're a good boy, Mickey," Mick's ma tells him, tears in her eyes as she hugs him. There's a letter in her hand, something about pa's work, and it's good news, for once. Good news and good luck: a promotion instead of a firing. "Such a good boy. But why didn't you break your fire-starting while you're at it?"

Mick would explain that even if a curse had started it, it didn't change the fact that it happened, and once it happened it happened and now it's his own brain that keeps it going, but in truth the curse-breakers might've been able to do something about that to mitigate the symptoms even if not the cause, so he tells her the other part of it: "You can only break one curse that way."

She hugs him again. 

"My boy," she says. "My good boy, my changeling boy."

Mick'd love to point out that he's not a changeling, but he decides not to. He hugs her back instead, then breaks away when he feels overwhelmed. 

He gets older. He still hates looking people in the eye, but he learns to force himself to do it: it might be one of the Gentlemen walking abroad, intent on mischief, and if no one else stops them then Mick's going to do it himself, one way or the other. His ma taught him that much. 

When little Maricruz down the block, Miss Rita's pride and joy, turns out to look away from people the way Mick does, not walking or talking when she should, Mick's ma brings Mick over to see her.

"Go on now," she says encouragingly. "Take a look now; she a changeling, too?"

Mick sits next to her for a while, playing with some of her toys that she isn't using, and after a while she lets him look into her eyes. 

"She's not a changeling," he says, "and anyway I think that's just a word people use for different, 'cause the Gentlemen don't like to leave nothing behind. She's just who she is - some little part of her got grown three times over, and now she'll grow up different. She'll love everyone she meets, and smile at everything, and throw terrible tantrums sometimes when people don't follow the rules, but that's just a fact and nothing to it. But you oughta do something about the whistling in her heart."

"Whistling?" Miss Rita asks, alarmed.

The doctor says it's a heart murmur, a small one the hospital didn't catch but which might get worse if not tended; it's a very good thing Miss Rita brought her Maricruz in.

As for the rest of it, they run some tests and it turns out that Mick was right about the rest, too, even if he's got no idea what Down syndrome actually is.

Either way, little Maricruz is as friendly as Mick said she'd be. She’s only a baby, but she smiles and gurgles and soon enough she’s old enough to give hugs and laugh and talk for hours about her favorite doll, kind of like the way Mick talks and talks and talks about his favorite television show. 

She wears a ring of iron around her neck to keep her from strangers who might not be as friendly back. 

It's a growing risk in their town. 

Mick's not the only one to notice, neither. 

Sure, maybe the others don't see the hidden faces behind the people who come through town, toting backpacks and life insurance contracts and bibles and pamphlets, each and every other of them with the same fixed-fake smile on their face, but they're still smart enough to realize that there's something that ain't right about them: the way they try to pick fights, the way things go wrong around them, the horrible way they smile. 

The way they always try to lure you into signing something, or buying something, or signing up to something.

A few of 'em get further than the others, shilling something about people what are born browner than others being the real issue that's causing all the trouble they've been having, but Mick's ma's got plenty of friends who were born in a hundred different shades and she's naturally the suspicious sort of person, so she brings Mick around to look at them.

The town's learned to pay attention when Mick's ma brings her changeling boy around.

"Well, baby?" she asks him loudly in the grocery store, where all about her can hear her even as they pretend not to. "Those three over there; they regular trouble or something more your style?"

Mick steals a look at them.

"The one in the front is a dream-eater," he says. "One of the one the reservation's always putting out those guards against. The other two, though, they're just dumb."

Dumb, and quarrelsome without real cause, and having their dreams eaten nightly: it ain't healthy for anyone, but they signed up their souls to have filth poured in all on their own, and there's nothing Mick can do to help them until they first decide that they need to help themselves. 

All three send him angry glares, and none so more than the dream-eater.

But Mick's ma tells Mick's pa and Mick's pa makes a face but doesn't argue and he puts on his boots and goes off down to the reservation to ask about how you scare off a dream-eater. 

He brings a couple of the people from there back with him, stern-faced but kind-looking, to tell what they know, and in a few days everyone in town's got catchers in their windows and is looking at the visitors with so much suspicion that they let themselves leave before they're inevitably kicked out - all three of them wondering to themselves aloud what sort of weird town this place be, and the leader of them lying through his teeth about what he does and doesn't know about it.

"This place is getting weirder and weirder by the day," Mick's pa comments to Lonnie from the reservation, who's gotten to be a decent friend of his by now. 

"The Nameless Ones - I think your wife call them the Gentlemen? - are far more common here than elsewhere," Lonnie agrees. "There's a source of power here for them, and as long as it's here, it'll call them."

"Don't you say that!" Mick's ma cries out, but it's too late, for all that Lonnie didn't mean it: the words have been said, and once said aloud they circle in the air and come to rest in people's heads to poison their minds. 

Later on, Lonnie comes and sits by Mick, who's got a little fire going in his firepit out back that Mick's pa built for him. "I'm sorry," he says. "My people's traditions are different, when it comes to one of you."

"It's okay," Mick says, staring into the fire. "I've known for a while that I'd have to go, but I didn't want to upset my ma."

"You're too young to leave home," Lonnie objects. "You aren't even full grown."

"Doesn't matter," Mick says. "Maybe it'll be put off a little, but I won't make full grown in this town where I was born, no way. The birds all agree."

The crow and the robin, the finch and the woodpecker, the hummingbird and the chickadee and the kingfisher, and they don't agree on very much.

He glances at Lonnie, a quick stolen glance that tells him more than he ever really wanted to know. "And you know that, too," he says, feeling a bit bad for Lonnie based on what he can see inside of him. "Even if you did tell your grandpa you wanted nothing to do with what he was teaching, you still know. You did your own leaving, when you were younger, and for the same reason."

Lonnie is quiet. 

"It's not too late," Mick adds, because it's true. "You've got it in you still. The schools didn't stamp it out." He frowns. "Why would schools stamp it out? They don't even know what it is. At least, my school doesn't, anyhow. They don't know nothing at my school, and they don't do nothing, neither."

Lonnie croaks a laugh, his throat harsh and dry. "You'd be amazed at what schools can rid you of. Your family, your heritage, your language, even your way of thinking...you really think it's not too late?"

"Oh yes," Mick says, looking for his answer at the man that was nodding over Lonnie's shoulder. "As long as you don't mind your grandfather crowing like a blue jay and telling you he was right after all."

Lonnie laughs again, but it's smoother this time, if sadder. "I'd let him," he says, and presses his thumb in the crease above Mick's nose. "Your eyes are something else, child."

"You should see what I see in the fire," Mick says, looking away, back to his beloved flames. "But you wouldn't want to."

It's another year until Mick's ma will finally agree to let him go, and the signs have all started: the cats that come from nowhere and go right back to it, the flocks of birds that watch the people and cannot be chased away, the poisoned fields right next to fields that explode with over-rich life, the strange rash that appears on people's hands if they take money from the wrong person and won't fade until they hold a thing made of iron in the light of the moon for an hour, the strict curfew that gets imposed after the first few people return home after dark with their eyes blinded by fairy-light and their lips filled with strange tales that if they're lucky they don't remember when the sun rises. 

And still Mick's ma persists in trying to keep Mick home with her, but when the house shakes with the rumbling of hooves at the dark of the new moon, all the lights in the town extinguishing at once whether electric or candle, and the sound of the hunter's horn echoes across the land - an old sound, an ancient sound - accompanied the howling of dogs that sound like wretched souls, when the sheer terror of it sends them all scurrying to their parents' bed as though that would bring them safety, she at last relents.

"I don't like it," she says wistfully. "I don't like it none at all. Can't you even come back to visit, after?"

Mick shouldn't, he knows. He was born to be an orphan, and it's only the neighborhood watch keeping an eye on their house in specific that's kept it from going up in flames a half-dozen times already, his beloved flames hungry to consume his family so that he will be left alone the way he was destined to be. 

And yet he loves his ma, who's always loved him, and so he looks into the fire deeper than he's ever looked before and says, "There's a way."

She doesn't like that way either, but she knows about the fires and she doesn't want to lose any of her other boys either, and in the end she agrees to let Mick give it a try. 

Mick takes a ring of silver - his ma's wedding band, in fact - out to the field in the middle of a full moon. He bows politely to the coyote that watches him with a smirk, come down from the reservation to watch the fun, and puts the ring into a puddle right in the center of a group of wild mushrooms.

"You know better than this," a voice pipes up: the child-fairy he met in a cow once, years before, and who speaks a bit too much of her mind. "What d'you want?"

"I want my family to be safe from me."

"You know how to do that already!" she exclaims, rolling her eyes. "Just go on your adventures, o seventh son of a seventh daughter. If you leave them early enough, you'll leave them to their peace instead of their deaths. Once you leave, the whole town will go back to sleep as the doors to the Courts Under-the-Hill close back down."

"I know that," Mick says patiently, taking the opportunity to rock back and forth, his hands moving purposelessly in the air. His teachers tell him not to, and his pa as well, but what they don't know don't hurt them. "But I want to be able to come and visit 'em after I go, without them being dead."

"As long as their names are carved in your heart, they'll be targets," she points out. 

"I know that," he says a second time. "And that's why I want to put their names on the ring instead."

"On the - oh. Oh, that's _clever_. You put their names on the ring instead of in your heart, and that means you can keep the _feelings_ in your heart instead, vague and amorphous and untargeted, but without the names there to find, none of the Gentlemen will be able to find them, neither. Secret names hidden with a _proper_ secret-casting. That's very clever, you know?"

"I know that," he says a third time. "Will you help me, or should I ask the laughing coyote instead?"

"Oh, I'll do it," she says. "But you'll give me something else back, one day. What I want's a name of my own. Doesn't have to be yours. But that's my price."

Mick considers this, and shrugs. "Okay."

And then he fishes the ring out of the water and goes home, to embrace his ma whose name he no longer remembers and now has never known, and kiss his pa for whom the same is true, to smile at the siblings that are little more than hazy outlines even to his enhanced sight, and he leaves the ring with them to take care of while he's gone. 

He goes to the old farmhouse on the edges of his family's property, the one that was left over from when they bought their neighbor's place, the one that's so far out that it very nearly straddles the line to Keystone City itself, and he watches as it burns.

And he waits. 

The local police call the city police, arguing that it's their problem, and the city police, grumbling, come with their cars and their disinterest and when the local firefighters tell them that Mick's all alone now, they believe him, and they put it down on paper, and they fix that untruth in their legal system as the truth in the courts of their own making.

The Gentlemen from beneath the hills may not enter the courts of the lands above, but they still bow to its decrees as if it was their own Court's rulings. And so it is that Mick is an orphan, truth in law, and they find no names in his heart to hunt down to spite him, and so the family that was left behind is safe.

Mick is, at long overdue last, on his way upon his journeys. 

Mick's hometown, that nameless place, is left behind, at peace again at last, as the Gentlemen shut the doors they'd build there in favor of following the orphaned boy with the strange eyes that see too much as he's sent away to Keystone City itself.

Mick misses his family.

He misses his ma most of all, his pa and his always well-meaning brothers too, but he knows they're safe now: no eldritch fires to burn them, no breath-stealing smoke to wind down the hills against the breeze, no Gentlemen slavering for blood at their door. 

He just wishes he could remember their names.

The court sends him to a foster family, over his objections that they don't listen to: his habits are taken as signs of lack of intelligence, and the words disability get tossed around a fair bit, and the first foster family he gets put with look disappointed to find out that he's perfectly fine going to regular school on the regular bus and that he can haltingly explain what accommodations he requires to the teacher himself. 

They're Crusaders, his new family, Mick is bemused to discover: they took him so as to be able to fight his battles for him, and in return for that willingness to do battle, they demand a strict adherence to their faith. 

"You do believe in Jesus Christ the Redeemer, who died and rose again, don't you?" the mother says, her tone just a touch accusing, judgment, like she assumes his first family 'died' because they weren't good enough or something.

"Sure," Mick says blankly. He's met the Gentlemen from under the Hill, he's heard the whispers of the birds that were born from no egg known to man, he's seen the Hunt ride and hidden from the howls of their dogs; why wouldn't he believe in a man returning from the dead? It seems almost quaint in comparison. "I mean, I went to church plenty before; Ma insisted." Mostly for the opportunity to gossip, of course, but she still went. 

"Good."

And then, of course, Mick has to ruin it by being too helpful, because he adds, "I even know my rosary and Hail Mary's and stuff." 

That ruins it, apparently, because that's what gets them going down the road to realizing that a boy named Mick Rory isn't just Irish but Catholic on top of it. No one'd had a problem with it back in his little town, where Catholic and Protestant and all the rest of the world mixed freely to share their faith's ideas on how to keep those that roamed the night at bay, but apparently Catholicism is barely better than heathenism to Mick's new family.

They don't much appreciate the stuff he does to try to protect them from the Gentlemen, neither, with the iron and the tin and the salt. It's all just heathenism again. 

Mick looks into their eyes and sees the mirrors in their souls, the ones aimed firmly inwards so they can see nothing more than themselves with their eyes aimed upwards in sacredness, and he knows there's no point in arguing: he's meant to be a prop, a troubled child that they've taken in to show their charity, and little more.

He _really_ misses his ma.

Christian faith or no, though, the Gentlemen still walk the earth around Mick's new family, their hungry teeth-for-eyes still fixed on Mick, and though Mick tries his best, stopping them from doing their worst against him is more trouble now than it ever was before. It takes a good while to manage to do it despite his new family resisting him on all grounds. 

One thing leads to another, and next thing Mick knows he's inside the dubious safety of the human courts once more, the human equivalents of the needle-toothed Gentlemen arguing over his fate - arguing over the fires he sets, and if they make a danger, and if there's anything to be done, and what would be best for him, where he should go and where he should stay. 

The kindest of them, a man with teeth as sharp as the rest but with the scales of justice held down by the clever hands of mercy in his heart, asks Mick what he would prefer.

Mick picks juvie over the Christian reform camp his new family suggests, even though - and perhaps because - he knows it means they won't take him back when he gets out.

He was getting tired of all that preaching anyways. 

Juvie's not as bad as it could be: the other boys look at the size of his shoulders and estimate the strength of his fists, and the conclusion they come to is that they ought to leave him alone even if he rocks back and forth and doesn't look no one in the eye for too long. 

It's even a little peaceful. After all, there's iron and steel all around, meant to keep the boys in - but in the process doing a mighty fine job of keeping the Gentlemen out.

It's a peace that ends when Mick hears the scuffle and the shouting and the thud of boot against ribcage, the snarl of "gut him!" and the nasty laughter of children taught to find their amusement in the pain of others.

Mick looks for a teacher, sees none, and decides to intervene: six boys on one isn't fair, even if all he can see of the one are some shrimp-sized feet kicking wildly. 

He calculated that he could scare them off, and he wasn't wrong. 

Some pounding of his fists sends them scattering, yowling, and Mick turns to the boy -

Not a boy.

"You're one of _them_!" Mick hisses, staring down at the pretty mask that hides a face that lost all humanity eons ago, a face with hungry eyes and sharp teeth and no morality that humans understand, a face as black as soot and darker than night with glasses the color of starlight to try to hide behind.

The Gentleman lurking in the child's body before him blinks up at Mick, then scowls. 

"That's racist, you know," he (they?) says.

It takes a second for the meaning of that to penetrate. "It is _not_!" Mick says indigently. "It's true!"

"Fine. Your tone when you _said_ it was racist."

"I should've let 'em stab you," Mick grumbles, before realizing what was wrong with that statement. "And anyway, it don't make no sense. How were they going to stab you anyhow? You're - _you know_. You could eat them for breakfast. Not literally. Well, maybe literally."

And the Gentleman - more of a fairy, really, he doesn't feel like dignifying this one with the title of Gentleman - would probably enjoy it, too.

Mick’s pretty proud of that phrasing, actually – his oldest brother taught it to him, he thinks, the ‘eat for breakfast’ phrase that initially confused him, but he thinks he’s mostly figured out how it’s used.

Mostly.

The fairy makes a face. "Not exactly."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"I ain't telling you! I don't owe you -" the fairy abruptly looks horrified. "Wait, that's not right -"

"Don't say anything about a life-debt!" Mick says quickly.

"Not saying it ain't gonna make it not true, y'know."

Damnit. 

"Well, start by telling me what 'not exactly' was supposed to mean," Mick instructs.

"I don't exactly got all of my powers, that's what it's supposed to mean," the fairy snaps, reluctant but clearly telling the truth - insofar as his (Mick is going with his for now) kind understand there to be such a thing as truth, anyway. They almost always tell a version of the truth, even if it don't match up with what humans think the truth is. "I got into an argument with my King and he bound me and got me sent into a maze of iron to see if I'd find my way out."

That sounded pretty shitty.

"How long have you got to go?" Mick asks.

"Three months."

Mick nods. "And how long was your sentence originally?"

"...three months."

Mick, who'd been looking at the fairy's right cheek instead of his eyes, can't help looking up at the fairy's eyes in sheer shock and dismay. "You telling me that you nearly got stabbed on your _first day_ -" 

He falls quiet.

He normally can't see into the eyes of the Gentlemen, not _really_ see into them, because they're guarded by glasses and masks and a hundred layers of defenses beyond that. Maybe it's the fact that this one is bound, or something like that, but those starlight glasses have slipped down and the bright eyes behind them are the fairy's own, and Mick falls into them the way he falls into fire -

And he _sees_.

He sees a heart made of solid silver, slippery but in its own way ever-lasting, a mirror facing outward, protected by ice and arrogance but fiercely treasuring the images it holds; he sees a mind sharp as a handful of needles; he sees - an endless maze, coaxing him further in - the wide infinite planes of the wild unending ocean - a great Tree of both dark wood and light, bearing fruit - he sees -

Darkness - endless, sucking darkness - drinking in light - pulling it in the way it pulls in everything else - _pulling_ \- 

The fairy kicks him in the shin. Hard.

Mick yowls and breaks eye contact. "What'd you do that for?" he demands.

"You were looking too deep," the fairy says. "And without control. That's not good for your type."

" _My_ type?" Mick echoes, scowling. "Who's the racist one now?" 

He glances at the fairy again, this time disciplining himself not to go too deep, reminding himself to stay back and look at the surface.

And this time he sees -

"You're a _cat_?!"

"I ain't!"

"You _are_!"

"I _was_ a cat," the fairy corrects sullenly. "Been a while since then. S'not my fault you can't tell the difference between lives."

That doesn't make any sense at all. 

Mick would ask, but he doesn't really care. What he cares about is a bit different. "That life debt - can we call you snapping me outta that trance you paying it back?"

"No," the fairy says grumpily. "Won't work."

"Then what would -"

"Mr. Rory!" one of the teachers shouts. "Mr. Snart! Get back here, classes are starting!"

"Snart?" Mick asks.

"They call me Leonard Snart," the fairy says. 

"That the boy who's skin you're wearing?"

"Suppose so," the fairy says indifferently. "Nothing left of him here, if that's what you're worried about - he froze to death this winter, and I got in between the emptying of the mind and the stopping of the heart."

Mick makes a face at that. He doesn't like the thought of freezing - or the fact that there's no occupant in the body to force the fairy to leave it behind anytime soon. 

And if he's not forced to leave, then that means he's free to follow Mick around, even inside the juvie that had become his haven.

Damnit.

"How can you even tolerate all the iron and steel here?" Mick complains. He'd thought he was safe, damnit.

"The body's emptiness provides me some protection," the fairy says. "S'why I picked it. I'm not here by _choice_ , you know."

"Can’t be comfortable for you." 

"It isn't meant to be. It’s meant to teach me a lesson in obedience," the fairy says, his voice clipped, and he marches back inside with a straight back. 

That response wasn't very much like one of the Gentlemen. It was almost understandable. 

Mick keeps stealing glances at the fairy, who seems determined to ignore Mick despite the life debt he owes him - even stranger, and less like the Gentlemen, who hate owing any sort of debt no matter how minor, and who pay them back with strange malice or, worse, stranger gifts. 

The cat in him is increasingly more visible, not less, each time Mick looks - some small shivering kitten, dropped into some stream of silver, and stretched out well beyond the size it ought to have been -

"You were born a cat," Mick guesses, sitting next to the fairy at lunch the next day. "And one of the Gentlemen made you into one of them."

"We're supposed to make for good servants," the fairy says, eyes firmly fixed on his food that he's barely picking at. "Go away."

"Don't you owe me?"

The fairy's eyes lift, blazing green all of a sudden, and he hisses, "I won't be _anyone's_ servant for _any_ reason. Not willingly."

Mick finds himself up from the table and back three steps just on pure instinct. 

He forces himself to return. 

"I don't want a servant," he says, staring at the table. 

"A life debt gets you a boon," the fairy says. "I'm not strong enough for one of those. So servitude's all that's left - and it's got to be paid."

"I don't want it."

"Doesn't matter what either of us want." 

Mick's having a conversation, he abruptly realizes, with someone who isn't from his family and used to him. It's even going well, and the fairy is somehow less alien to him than most people are - a mess of contradictions and expectations they've never shared with him but somehow expect him to understand regardless. The fairy, at least, explains himself, and repeats himself whenever he catches that Mick's confused (which he catches every time, more than anyone ever did before), and he's surprisingly easy to talk to and listen to.

That gives Mick an idea.

"I could use a translator," Mick offers tentatively. "I don't really get people, a lot of the time. You could do that until we get out of here, and I'd call it a done deal."

The fairy scowls, and doesn't respond.

Pity. Mick thought it was a pretty good deal: someone to talk on his behalf for him, and a limited time agreement for the fairy.

Four days later - three days and one, the way the Gentlemen count - the fairy boy walks into Mick's room and says, through gritted teeth, "Offer accepted."

Then he walks right back out again.

Mick blinks.

"Okay?" he calls after him. "Don't you need to be here for that?"

The fairy ignores him.

"Cat," Mick reminds himself, and shrugs. 

Except the fairy does keep up his side of the deal: any time Mick needs to talk to somebody, there he is, right nearby, talking for Mick and explaining what other people _mean_ with their body language and their unspoken assumptions and their omissions that drive Mick up the wall because it'd be so much easier if they just said what they meant rather than thinking they'd said it all when they only said half. It makes everything a lot easier once it's all laid out there. 

Best of all, the fairy does so in such a scathing tone that most people think he's insulting _them_ by explaining what to them is obvious, rather than dumbing it down for Mick. 

The second Mick doesn't need him, though, the fairy's gone like he was never there. He won't even sit with Mick at lunch and dinner and certainly not breakfast. 

"You know, this doesn't have to be as businesslike as you seem to be making it," Mick tries, once, wondering if he could get answers about the Gentlemen from the fairy boy if he's friendly.

For his trouble, he just gets a nasty hiss that suggests the fairy is considering slashing his face open with his fingernails that he seems to treat like claws.

"Why won't you just be nice for once?" Mick snaps. "You allergic or something?"

"I'm allergic to _you_ , asshole."

Ouch. 

"I didn't do nothing to you," Mick grumbles. "Just saved your life, that's all."

"And demanded servitude," the fairy says icily. 

"I didn't demand nothing! You said I had to take something!"

"You did."

"So wasn't that better than the alternative?"

"Yes."

"So?"

"So what? I still hate you."

Arrrrrrgh. 

"Can you translate that?" Mick says hopefully.

"There's nothing to translate. I'm going to blame you whether it's your fault or not, that's all."

"That's petty."

"Do I look like I care? Because I don't."

The fairy's refusal to engage further ought to be the end of it. Mick's never liked having the Gentlemen around, and here one was, offering to stay away - and of course Mick is chasing him like he wants something from him.

It's only -

Mick saw into the fairy's heart, deeper than he meant to. And he saw silver, pure and strong and true. 

The fairy is _good_ , fundamentally good, in a way few people of any kind are. Perhaps it's goodness only if measured by the standards of his own kind, but he's good nevertheless. He's good and loyal and true in a way the Gentlemen almost never are, like a knight from the old stories, and his faith, once given, will be given forever. That's how goodness works.

And Mick can't help but selfishly want some of that goodness for himself. 

So he pesters him, and nags him, and extends hand after hand in friendship.

He flatters the chef and convinces her to make him a little milk cake - scarcely more than a cupcake - that he gives to the fairy, who looks at it suspiciously, steals half, and disappears, no more friendly than when he started.

He sits next to him in silence, or at least tries to - the fairy tends to move away when he tries it, but sometimes if the fairy is doing something else they can sit in what's almost a companionable silence.

He tries to defend him, fruitless as he knows it to be, but the fairy is unimpressed.

Nothing works.

The closest he gets to progress is one day, when Mick is trying the sitting in silence thing again and the fairy is permitting him, he sees passerbys moving beyond the fence, all wearing red shirts, and he laughs at the Star Trek-ness of it. 

"What's Star Trek?" the fairy asks, suspicious of Mick's motives as always.

Mick loves Star Trek, and so he explains: the structure of the show, the characters, the ethos, the development –

The bell rings, signaling the end of the period, and Mick stops, horrified, realizing that he's spent nigh on thirty minutes explaining a television show to a mute audience.

He remembers very well how his brothers always hated it when he did that, how the people at school would get annoyed by it, how his pa always interrupted him when he got going. The fairy hadn't interrupted him, though, and so he'd just kept barreling on. 

"I hope that wasn't too much," he says weakly.

"No," the fairy says. "And you weren't done, either. When the class is over, you will tell me the rest."

"I can go on for hours," Mick explains.

"Then we will take hours," the fairy says. "I like learning things."

That gives Mick hope that he's getting somewhere, but the fairy's stony face and general avoidance continue, with his agreement to remain and listen sharply delineated as to the time he devotes to listening to Mick explain a particular issue.

It's a pity that Mick's not that good at talking, or else he'd do it forever just to keep the fairy boy paying attention to him.

Nothing else works, though, that's for sure, and the fairy remains as bitterly antagonistic as the very first day, no matter what Mick tries. 

Three months pass quicker than Mick thought possible, and he and the fairy get let out the very same day.

The fairy boy's gone in a wink of an eye.

He doesn't even let Mick say goodbye.

Mick's despondent, of course, even though he knew he ought to have expected it. The wall of ice and arrogance around the fairy was built up high, the defense against the world, and someone who loves as fiercely as his fairy boy wouldn't give in just to nagging, no matter how much Mick might've wanted to make friends. But he's sad nevertheless, and because of that feeling he sinks inside himself and ignores everyone and everything as he gets processed through the foster system again, right up until he ends up in front of his brand new foster mom, a steely looking woman named Etta.

"You don't have to look at me if you don't want to," she says to him, speaking to him directly, the first person since he left juvie to do that instead of talking about or around him. "But I'd like to lay out some rules for the house."

She lays out the rules too quick for Mick to understand. 

Mick wants to say something, ask her to repeat herself for him, but he's not sure how - he doesn't want to offend her none, and he doesn't want to make her think he wasn't listening when he was, but he didn't catch it because he's being slow today and he's not sure what's the best approach here.

"Say it again slower," his fairy boy demands, coming out of nowhere. "And go over why you want each one."

"Saints and angels!" Etta exclaims, putting her hand on her heart in surprise. 

"You!" Mick exclaims, beaming. "I thought - what are you doing here?"

"I'm translating for you," the fairy boy says, frowning at him. "Ain't that the deal?"

"Well, _yeah_ , you translate for me until we _get out of juvie_ , but we're out now. I didn't think I'd ever see you again."

The fairy boy frowns at him, staring at him intently. "You really meant that," he says, sounding thoughtful. 

"Of course I did."

The fairy boy sighs. "A life debt's gotta be equal to a life saved," he says. "You might value communication skills as equal to a life, but it'll be a human lifetime to pay off." 

Mick takes the time to try to process that, and when he does he pales. Of course the fairy boy didn't eat with him - Mick's made a servant where he only wanted a friend, out of someone who never wanted to belong to anyone.

"Oh, you're hopeless without me, ain't you?" the fairy boy says, but his tone is more amused than anything. "Good thing we made a deal, then."

"Good thing," Etta says. "Good thing, he says. Lord almighty. Listen here, you, what manner of eldritch being beyond-the-stars are you?"

Mick's never heard that name for the Gentlemen before.

"I'm from the land of the Laughing God-of-Many-Faces," the fairy boy says dryly. "A goodfellow writ miniature, if that makes it clearer."

"Lord almighty," Etta says again. "Mick, boy, you happy with this deal? 'cause I've got a junkyard full of iron and tin out back that we could line the place with to keep him out, if you want."

Mick's touched, and pleased that she knows the old defenses. But still - "No thanks," he says, polite as he can manage. "He'd still have to come, whether we blocked him out or not, and he'd suffer. So we might as well let him come."

"Never thought I'd see the day when I let an alien come sit at my table," she says. "But I'm supposing we don't got no other choice."

Turns out Etta's a big believer in UFOs and visitors from the stars, but Mick's not going to argue: the defense against them is still iron and tin and salt, and when he asks his fairy boy whether the Gentlemen actually _are_ aliens he just gets a smirking smile in return. So what does he know? Maybe they are and maybe they ain't, but it doesn't matter to Mick.

It doesn't matter to Mick, because maybe some of that nagging and shared silences and gifts did work, after all, because the fairy boy comes around more and more nowadays, even when Mick's not talking to no one, and as long as Mick fetches him a cup of milk with a dollop of honey from the kitchen, he's even willing to linger a while. 

"You need to get yourself a name, boy," Etta tells him one day over dinner, passing him some meatballs which he's viewing with what Mick agrees is rightful trepidation - Etta's many things, but she's no cook, and Mick forgot to make something today before she could get there, and once she's in the kitchen and clattering around he doesn't dare offer lest he offend her. 

"Why would I?" the fairy boy asks, poking at them with the pure-silver fork Etta dug up for him for cheap from a pawn shop. "Mick doesn't have a problem with it."

"Yeah, well, I want one. I'm tired of just calling you 'hey, you' when I want to get your attention. I need something of substance."

"My papers say Leonard Snart," the fairy boy offers. 

"Papers?"

"That's what the body was called," Mick says. 

"The body -? Boy, you telling me there's a momma and poppa out there wailing for their lost son while you're swanning around in there?!"

"...no?"

"Get you to his home!" she exclaims, bristling like a firecracker. "Now!"

Mick's fairy boy frowns at her, then glances down at the meatballs and decides that he'd be better off obeying than eating. In between a blink, he's gone.

"Now why'd you have to do that?" Mick complains, pushing his own meatball around his plate. It makes a dull clonking sound as it does, which doesn't seem exactly right. "He might wear Leonard Snart's face, but he's not him."

"The family deserves closure," Etta says firmly, and Mick would be angrier about her sending his fairy boy away but she means so well, he can see it every time he forces his eyes up to look at her. She's been good to him: she lets him rock back and forth as much as he likes as long as he's in his chair at home, even teaches him some exercises that get the same stimulus to his brain, and she gets him all sorts of interesting things to do with his hands when the inputs to his brain seem like they're as much on fire as the candles he lights. And he finally has one of those big old blankets all to himself, a blanket weighed down heavy with more than just feathers, and he can wrap himself in it whenever he gets overwhelmed by the outside world. 

Etta’s great, but he doesn’t think she’s always right. But she insists on these things, sometimes.

As he expected, it all goes wrong, of course: the fairy boy's back within a day, with an address, and when Etta gears up special to go talk with them it turns out the older Snart's so drunk that he scarcely noticed his real boy dying at all.

Etta slaps him in the face on principle regardless, and he tries to shoot her for it, and it's only his fumbling that gets them out of there. 

"He's awful," the fairy boy says once they're in the car. "But I suppose he'll do well enough for family."

"You're _joking_ ," Etta says. She's breathing hard and her eyes are white all around the edges and her hand is over her chest like she can slow her beating heart just by putting pressure on it. She clearly hadn't expected the gun, or the running, while Mick had taken one look at the old Snart's eyes and figured that something bad was going to happen eventually.

"He's not really using it," the fairy boy points out with a shrug. 

"Using _what_?"

"His family. His family name," Mick explains. He doesn’t always understand why Etta and the other so-called regular people find the Gentlemen so confusing: they almost always say what they mean, even when they’re trying to trick you. Hearing everything too literally is really quite helpful when dealing with them, he finds; that’s where they sneak in most of their mischief, by telling the truth in a way that people don't realize is the truth. "Names are important, and he seemed dumb enough to agree to share his. Say, you think I can give his name to someone else, too? I've got debts to pay."

The fairy boy shrugs. "Go for it."

And that's how his fairy boy - who officially adopts the name Leonard Snart as one of his own manifold titles - ends up gaining a sister who takes on the name Lisa Snart, and both of them aping the presence of children to a man who is in fact dumb enough and drunk enough to swear to the fact of it inside a human court in exchange for a few extra bills each month.

And, of course, that’s good enough for them. What's sworn in a human court is honored by other courts, and the Gentlemen of the Hills think far more highly of the bonds laid down upon them than many humans do.

"Thank you," the fairy boy - Leonard, or Len, as Mick's been practicing calling him, though he defaults to 'buddy' and 'boss' pretty often - tells Mick one day, unusually solemn. 

“For what?” Mick asks.

“All my natural-born siblings drowned, I think,” Len says. “Or maybe they were eaten; I don't know. I didn’t realize what it’d mean to have another one. A real one, bound by court-oaths – I like her,” he says, sounding rather surprised by the concept. “I want to groom her and feed her and care for her.”

Mick thinks a little concernedly about the girl-fairy he first met when he was much younger, and of the silver ring she helped him enchant, and he says doubtfully, “I’m not sure she needs much caring for.”

Len shrugs. “Still want to.”

Lisa comes up to Mick a few days after that and pins him with a golden-eyed glare. 

“What?” Mick squeaks. 

“I owe you a boon,” she says. 

“You – no! You don’t owe me, I was just getting you my side of the bargain!”

“You promised me a name,” she says. “You _got_ me a brother.”

“Uh,” Mick says. “I’m glad you feel that way?”

“Glad has nothing to do with it,” she says impatiently. “He is, and it is, and so it will be; you have given me both burden and benefit, weakness and strength, and I must repay you for it. We're uneven, and I won't be satisfied until I've paid my debts.”

Her eyes glimmer and glitter, more like a jewel than eyes even through her tightly-latched glasses, and Mick’s not sure if it’s a threat or an offer – or if it’s not both. 

Sometime Mick forgets that she’s true-blood fairy, not like Len is; but now’s not one of those time. They don’t have emotions like regular living beings do, the Gentlemen. 

“What, then?” he says warily.

She opens her mouth to say something, but never finishes it – Len is there, at Mick’s side, glaring at her. “You don’t negotiate with him without me,” he says, bristling. “Not nobody, not even you.” 

“Even me?” she purrs. 

“A deal is a deal,” Len says. “No matter how precious you are, and you are very precious indeed.”

She doesn’t entirely know what to do with that – mortal affection is about as unknown to her as the nuances of most unspoken language is to Mick – but like all of the Gentlemen, she knows the importance of a contract, and of a negotiation. She backs off.

“Would’ve thought you’d know better than to go accepting gifts,” Len lectures Mick. “Especially from Gentlefolk who don’t know or care what you mortals like or don’t like.” 

“I know, I know.”

“She could’ve given you the ability to survive in tough spots,” Len points out. “And with it the curse of getting into tough spots to begin with.”

“I know, I know!”

“Or give you good hearing, but take your eyes –”

“I _know_!”

“You’re hopeless,” Len says, rolling his eyes and pushing Mick into the couch so that he can lie down and put his head into Mick’s lap. 

He’s been doing that recently. Mick’s delighted: he’s never had a cat before. 

Cat-person? Fairy-cat-person?

Whatever. 

He likes Len. He likes Len a lot.

…oh, crap.

“Len,” he says. “I need to talk to someone privately.”

“Not Lisa!” 

“No, not her. Uh, actually - could you dial a forgotten number for me?”

Len blinks owlishly at him, cat eyes obscured behind the hazel-tinted glasses of human eyes he wears. “Of course,” he says. “Who would you like to speak to? Santa? Your great-grandfather’s ghost? The King of Atlantis?”

“Don’t tease me,” Mick says warningly. Len’s usually pretty good at being very literal so that Mick can understand him, which Mick appreciates, and he doesn’t know why he’d stop and…

...and judging by Len’s confused expression, he was being entirely literal then, too.

Mick will _never_ understand the Gentlemen’s strange ways.

(Forget Santa, Atlantis is _real_?!)

“Just my family,” he clarifies. “The forgotten ones. I’d like to speak with them again, even though I’ve forgotten them – to protect them, you understand. Do you think there's a way I could talk to them without undoing the enchantment? The whole point was so that I'd be able to see them again.”

“Oh, that,” Len says. “Yes, of course, I know just the person to connect you. Certainly easier than trying to get onto the calling schedule of the Emperor in Yellow, that’s for sure.”

“I don’t want to know if that’s a joke,” Mick says firmly. “At all. Ever.”

Len rolls his eyes at him. “The Mirror Master owes me some favors,” he says. “You can dial them up that way.”

“That’s a stupid name,” Mick observes. 

“Not as stupid as his face,” Len says, which Mick feels doesn’t bode well for this interaction. 

"You mean you think he's stupid, right?" Mick asks to confirm anyway. "Not that his face is actually...?"

"I do think he's stupid," Len says, leading Mick to the mirror in their bathroom. "But he also wears a very stupid mask."

The mask, when Mick sees it, is as bright green as a frog's bottom, as bright orange as Cinderella's pumpkin, and it does, indeed, look very stupid.

It does, however, very effectively conceal the person underneath, to the point that Mick can't tell anything about him via the mirrored pieces of glass he has instead of eyes.

"What," the Gentleman (Mick assumes) barks.

"Want to make a call," Len says.

The Mirror Master swells up like an indignant bullfrog. "Scry it your own damn self, or have you forgotten how? I am not your personal telephone service!"

"How strange," Len says, his voice gone too-pleasant and sticky-sweet. "Here I thought you _were_ \- my own little telephone service, transport service, whatever I needed, I thought you said. But if you'd prefer things to be back the way they were before - refunded seven times over -"

The bullfrog deflates. "Oh, right," the Mirror Master says. "Sorry about that. I've been dealing with a lot of stupid requests recently - I've been thinking of trying to install an actual telephone switchboard to deal with them, actually -"

"You're the one who wanted the position of Master of the mirror plane," Len points out, rolling his eyes. "And now you complain about the price that comes with it."

"Typical, I know," the Mirror Master agrees. "Anyway, what call do you want to make?"

"Routed through the betwixt and between," Len says. "My partner here wants to speak with his family, but he sold their names for their own protection, so it can't go through Underhill nor Overhill where it might be intercepted."

"For their own protection, huh? Really? How interesting." The Mirror Master cranes his head to look at Mick. "And did you say _partner_? You telling me _you_ got yourself a partner?"

"This is Sam," Len tells Mick, who arches his eyebrows - both at the common name, and the fact Len was giving it to him, a fact that makes the Mirror Master, Sam, grumble. "He'll make your call. You want to do the call without my negotiation? That's not really part of our deal."

"Neither is catnip."

"Point taken," Len says. He liked catnip a _lot_ , and stealing the catnip Mick bought for him most of all. "Have fun."

He retreats.

"You got lucky with that one," Sam says, sounding wistful. "He's got a purer heart and looser morals than most Gentlemen, on account of his history, and that makes him easier to deal with than most of the rest of them."

"Cats are very contrary," Mick agrees. "So - Sam, huh?"

"Sam Scudder," Sam confirms. "Human, originally. It's complicated. Your partner there helped me win my throne, and more besides. You want to talk to your family, huh?"

"Yeah, my ma and pa, not all of 'em. But without drawing attention to them."

Sam grins. "My specialty."

And then he reaches out from the mirror and yanks Mick in.

The mirror world is vast and filled with mirrors, ever-changing and confusing, and Sam leaves Mick in a small apartment with instructions not to touch anything with a reflective surface.   
Mick wonders if Len knew this would happen.

A moment later, though, his doubts are gone when Sam reemerges through yet another mirror, his arm looped around the waist of Mick's ma.

"There you go - ouch, woman! You've got a hell of a right hook!" 

Mick's ma just punched him.

"Wait to you see what I'm gonna do to the rest of you," she says, eyes a-blazing, and then she sees Mick and cries out.

"I'm gonna get your pa now," Sam says hastily, eyeing Mick's ma with wariness. "You have a nice chat."

"That grabby beast a friend of yours?" Mick's ma asks, hands going to her waist and her eyebrows arching. 

"It's complicated," Mick says, and hugs her just a little. 

"Oh, my boy," she says, and she sounds so proud. She's always been proud of him. "Tell me everything you can."

"I will," Mick promises. "I need your advice, anyhow."

"At your age, I should hope so," she says. "And magic or no magic, we're coming to the wedding."

"I don't even know if he likes me back!" Mick squawks. "And how'd you know, anyhow?"

"I've raised seven sons," his ma says tartly. "You think I don't know what it looks like, when one of my boys've gone and lost his heart? I've heard it all before."

"Not this way you haven't," Mick says, and waves at his dumbfounded pa spilling into the room with wide eyes and a shove by Sam.

"You don't know the best of my family stories," his ma says. "Go on, try me."

The explanation takes a while, Mick stuttering to explain it all, going too deep in some areas and not enough in others, but eventually they get there. 

"Well, now," Mick's pa says, sounding a little blank.

"See, what'd I tell you," Mick's ma says. "Not all that different from the usual: the boy's in love."

"With a fairy," Mick's pa says.

Mick's ma shrugs. "Just like in all the stories. Sides, my great-aunt Fi had a selkie lord for a husband."

"She was a woman and he was a man," Mick's pa says.

"So what? Your great-uncle Thomas used to have himself boys, sometimes three of 'em at a time, and nobody said nothing 'cause he used to be a sharpshooter in the war."

"And I don't know if the Gentlemen have genders, exactly," Mick says. "And besides, Len's not entirely a fairy neither - he's a cat turned fairy."

"A _cat_ ," Mick's pa says, sounding pained. "You wanna romance a cat."

Mick's ma just gives him a significant look, and he makes a face. "Yeah, yeah, I get it, ‘least he's human shaped; leave off already, woman!"

"Leave off what..?"

"You can ask your uncle Jas and his old goat that," Mick's pa mutters, then gets elbowed and squeaks. "I mean, I'll tell you when you're older."

Mick's older already!

"Enough of that, both of you," Mick's ma says sternly. "I want to hear everything I've missed. And I want to know what employment my changeling boy's gonna take up, now that he's older and all."

"Employment?" Mick asks. He hadn't really thought that far in advance. 

"Our boy's smart as anything, that much is clear," Mick's pa says to her doubtfully. "But I don't know how well he'd fit in most jobs - especially what with the Gentlemen still stalking him."

"He's still gotta eat somehow," Mick's ma points out. 

"I've got some school left," Mick says quickly. "Free of charge for a bit. I'll figure it out when the time comes."

Figuring it out isn't exactly what happens, either about the awkward romance business or the employment business.

For one thing, Mick doesn't exactly know how to court anyone, much less a cat that accepts all gifts and scritches and food as his due right - Mick thought that might be the Gentleman in him, but no, Lisa's a lot more careful to keep the lines between them drawn evenly, a gift for a gift, a meal for a meal, and all the while eying him with a dark promise of a gift made good for getting her the prize of her brother, so it means that it's just Len being himself. 

For another, well, there isn't really an understanding of property, exactly, in the lands beyond the Hill. 

There is, however, a very firm understanding of the concept of _conquest_.

Or, as it’s called when it’s applied to the property of others, _theft_.

"You put that back right now!" Etta hollers. 

"But why?" Len asks, scowling. "I got it fair and square. You said you were hoping to get in more cash for the year-end, weren't you?"

"Cash! Cash, you beastly green man from Mars! _Gold bars ain't cash_!"

"They _ain't_?! Since when?!"

"They were cash for a long time," Lisa agrees. "Back in Rome -"

"Don't you back-in-ancient-Rome me, missy! Where the hell you get that, anyhow, Lenny?"

"I got it from the dragon," Len says. 

"You robbed Reserve?" Lisa asks, sounding intrigued. "I thought that hoard was well protected."

"Not against me," Len boasts.

Mick glares. 

"Us," Len amends. 

"Mick!" Etta exclaims. "You telling me you were involved in this tomfoolery?"

Mick shrugs. He was. "They had enough. They're not gonna miss it."

"And what if this dragon ate you?" she challenges. "What then?"

Mick shakes his head. "They're Gentlemen," he explains, or tries to. "They don't have dragons like our dragons."

"What's that mean?"

Mick thinks over his answer. This is one place where Len can't help him translate, a concept too deep in Gentlefolk lore to be translated by one of their own, and they both know it. "The Gentlemen's courts respect our courts," Mick finally says. "Because it's parallel. And for them, a giant hoard of money's means it's a dragon's hoard. And that, in turn, means every bank that hoards money is a dragon. S'got nothing to do with fire-breathing lizards or nothing."

"They're just coincidental," Len agrees. "We robbed the great Reserve - biggest dragon hoard in the country." He bounces on his heels, very pleased and proud of himself. 

Etta closes her eyes. "Tell me," she says, very slowly, "that this here gold bar ain’t from the _Federal Reserve gold deposit_."

"Well," Mick says. "You _did_ always say no one would notice if Fort Knox lost a bit..."

"You're a regular menace, you two are," she snorts, but she's already looking at the gold bar differently. Etta’s a conspiracy theorist at heart, and deeply suspicious of the government keeping all that gold for themselves. "Well, I guess if it's here _already_...but where can I redeem something like this without being found out?"

"You own a _junkyard_ , Etta," Mick says. "Just smelt it down and pawn it in pieces or something."

Things get easier after that: Len and Lisa both enjoy the vast new horizons that is Mick attempting to cook, since Etta certainly can't, and they're determined to make sure that they're never short this human "cash" again.

Mick's not exactly sure when his line of work officially shifted from "student" to "thief", but at least his parents don't mind. Etta calls them on Mick's behalf and passes on word, which is nice - as long as Mick doesn't hear 'em, the spell holds, and Etta doesn't mind playing pass-along. 

Apparently they've got some family back out east that they don't talk too much that's really into crime or something like that, and anyway Mick's parents are small-time farmers and they hate big banks, big corporations and the government about all the same, so as long as Mick promises not to rob the regular folks they're just happy he found a profession that suits him.

And it does suit him pretty damn well: there's apparently plenty of call for arsonists in Central City to go along with thieves, so to Central City they go and in Central City they largely stay.

The romance thing, though, that's trickier. 

Mick's too much of a coward to do anything for a couple of years or so, then - in order to avoid his parents' teasing - he makes a move of desperation and asks Lisa if he can trade in his favor for courting advice.

"No," Lisa says. "Courting's serious business, Mickey. It's even got 'court' in the name, that's how serious it is. You don't mix debts with courting."

For a race that mixes debts with well on _everything else_ , that's news to Mick.

Lisa's suggestions ain't even all that helpful, either - they just make no sense from a mind that works on mortal lines, and even when Mick tries them anyway, it doesn't even work: he doesn't have it in him to do the steps right.

He's got everything else in him, but apparently not that.

"You're a seventh boy of a seventh girl," Lisa says, rolling her eyes. "You're humanity's defense mechanism. Guess it makes sense that courting right-style isn't in your blood."

"I don't care what's in my blood or ain't in there," Mick snarls, pissed off beyond all reason, and he marches off and yanks Len in for a kiss just to say fuck you to all of that nonsense about destiny and blood and whatnot.

As it happens, that does resolve the issue, though not quite in the way Lisa'd intended.

Well, Mick's not sure about that. She's sneaky.

Of course, the main result of this is that Len becomes even more unbearable, but that Mick's okay with that.

"I'm working on this," Mick tells his asshole partner when he literally _drapes_ himself over the motorcycle Mick is building from scratch.

"I know," Len agrees. "And not paying attention to me."

"Len!"

"Tell me about the motor," Len says. "I like listening to you."

Mick would _rather_ finish putting it together, but he likes spending time with Len, too, so he settles in for a nice long explanation. Len listens the entire time, asking interesting questions, even though it takes them all the way until dinner.

Sneaky selfish cat.

It's not all fun, though: the Gentlemen stayed away for a year and a day, in honor of their new courtship, but after that they come back in full force, with glasses covering their eyes and masks hiding their faces and the truth of them invisible to everyone but Mick.

Mick still doesn't like looking in people's eyes, but he gets better at faking it, and anyway his eyes get sharper or something: he can see them coming from further away. 

One of them tries to possess Etta, sneaking in when she's out shopping, but Len chases them out with a hiss and Mick with an iron bar. 

Luckily, Etta doesn't mind - if anything, she's elated to share her extraterrestrial abduction experience with her friends online. Her Usenet forum has never been so enthusiastic, and at least four people come to visit Etta's junkyard in the hopes of also getting 'taken'.

Mostly this results in Mick moving out, and he takes Len and Lisa with him. 

"I'll miss you," Etta says, already preparing her next application for foster children - Mick stayed some ways past the limit, which she allowed given his special needs. "Come visit, or at least remember to call - I'll tell you about your parents."

Mick likes that, and calls often. 

He and Len continue to thieve for a living. Lisa continues to be glorious and glamorous without any apparent effort.

Len whispers secrets to Mick in the dark: the name of the Gentleman who created him, his King beneath the Hill, and how Len hates him so - how he has put him off only for a time, a breathing space of seven years and a day, and how his and Lisa's mortal "parent" has been lured into the Underhill, his soul taken in trade for pleasure, and now his body taken as his terrible King's newest puppet. How Len knows that his time is already up, and yet has heard no summons: how he fears that when the summons comes, it will be all the worse for the reprieve.

Mick holds Len in his arms and makes no promises that he might break, but in his heart he vows to drive away this King with iron and silver, and anything that was given to him at birth to make him target and protector both.

He usually defers to Len's ever-clever mind for plans, especially about thieving, but the Underhill teaches only conquest, not defense - protection, especially of others, is a human trait, and Mick's duty alone.

He comes up with a plan of his very own.

He waits.

At last, the summons comes: the shell of the man Lewis Snart once was comes to visit, leering and insufferable, and beneath his flesh and behind his mask is a creature so crude and filthy that Mick can scarcely bear to set eyes upon him. 

"You will come to me in a week and a day," Len's sire says to Len, smiling with sharp teeth at Mick, who Len has forced to promise not to lift a hand against. "And you will do for me a task of my choosing, in return for which I will lift an equal portion of your debt to me."

Len grits his teeth, but bows his head.

A week and a day is enough time for Mick to put his plan into action, if barely.

"You can't go," Mick says, when Len makes himself ready. 

"I must go," Len says, though it is clear that he doesn't want to. "He is my authority."

"You have been summoned by a greater authority," Mick says. "I checked with Lisa; that outweighs and nullifies his request - while still paying off your debt to the degree he indicated."

"That is true," Len says, frowning in confusion. "The call of a Greater Court is passed through the lines of vassalage, and I am paid for performing the task assigned on the day assigned regardless. But what summons has come from a Greater Court, that I have not heard of it? And what task would they assign to me?"

"Your appearance, that's all," Mick says, and brandishes the envelope that arrived in the mail. "By order of the _human_ Court."

Len stares at him.

"We've got a court date today," Mick explains. "Arraignment, for burglary. I went and confessed on your behalf, and the cops agreed to set the date I wanted."

"Does that count?" Len asks Lisa.

"What's the severity of the request?" she asks.

Mick had been expecting that, which is why he'd chosen his crime carefully. "Burglary is one of the highest crimes," he says promptly - it's true, even if the penalties for theft in the city of Central tended not to be as harsh in the circumstances Mick had chosen to confess to. "Part of the Big Five."

"To be called to a court to answer for the highest of crimes outweighs the call of your King to a task," Lisa concludes, and looks approvingly at Mick. "We may take you beyond the Hill yet."

"No thanks," Mick says hastily. 

"This won't work every time," Len says, but he looks happy beyond measure. "But this task was to be a particularly terrible one, to punish me for my long absence; I am pleased to miss it."

"They might sentence us to imprisonment in an iron cell," Mick reminds him.

"And yet that would still be better," Lisa says, and she despises all iron with the vengeance of her kind, so Mick knows how serious and terrible it was, this task that Len is now avoiding.

Len tells his King, who howls in rage but cowers in fear from the formal stationery of the court, bowing his head before its mighty seal; and so they go to court.

Mick spends most of the time looking up the requirements of becoming a notary. He rather likes the idea of using the instruments of the human courts against the Gentlemen, and apparently a felony conviction isn't necessarily a problem.

Not that they get one, of course. Mick's confession is swiftly tossed out of court by the very efficient lawyers he's hired, and beyond that they have nothing to go on. 

"Our knights beat your knights!" Len calls over to the angry-looking CCPD, waving cheerfully, and gets confused glares in response. "That was fun," he remarks to Mick. "We should do it again soon."

Mick smiles.

The notary thing works out great, too. It's enough to make a man consider applying to law school.

Len looks almost hilariously aghast when Mick suggests it, so he won't, but still.

They're not as lucky the next time Mick has to maneuver them a court date to avoid Len's hateful King: they end up plea bargaining down to a set of misdemeanors - the CCPD _hate_ it, but the DAs mutter something about charisma and make the deals anyway - and end up going to prison for a bit.

"You gonna be okay?" he asks Len, worriedly.

"I'm iron-resistant, remember?" Len points out with a shrug.

Iron-resistant only goes so far, though: each day they spend inside, he gets paler and weaker, less vibrant. It's a slow decline, but a decline it is. 

"Is there anything I can do?" one of the other inmates murmurs to Mick, watching Len listlessly drag himself to get food. “I’m a doctor; I can check him…”

"Nah, no need. We'll be out soon, that'll fix him," Mick says, vowing to himself that they're not getting caught again. But he remembers his manners, and glances sidelong at the other inmate to thank them for the offer, and –

"Oh, crap," he says. "You're fae-touched."

"I - beg your pardon?"

"What's your name?" Mick demands. "Don't worry, I'm safe; I'm a seventh, not one of _them_."

The inmate is staring at him with big round eyes that Mick forces himself to meet. A good man, he has here, a good man and an innocent one, but yes, definitely fae-touched. 

"Your name!" Mick barks when he doesn't answer. 

"Henry Allen," the man says. "Why do you ask?"

"Because your wife is in danger," Mick says, reading the truth of it in Allen's eyes. 

The man's jaw works. "My wife is dead."

"Being stabbed with a silver blade is pretty deadly, yeah, but not at the speed of lightning," Mick says impatiently. "She's probably just stuck in a pocket or something."

"Listen here," Allen growls. "I saw her die. I tried to hold the blood in with my own hands, and that's why I'm _in here_ at all -"

Mick hisses. "Have the courts decided?" he demands. "Has your case been ruled on?"

"I'm - I'm still awaiting trial -"

"Good. That means it hasn't been solemnized. There's still a chance of saving her."

"Don't mock me!"

"I'm _not_ \- damnit, Len, I need you to explain!" he snaps at Len, who's finally returned to his side with a dazed expression. "Tell him what I mean!"

After a brief explanation, Len's expression clears and he studies Allen. "Definitely the work of a Gentleman," he says. "And a bad one, too -"

Len, for all that he resembles humanity in his ability to feel emotions, does not have a moral compass that maps onto human standards. His comment, Mick knows, relates entirely to his estimation of the _competence_ of the person in question, and even that mostly as a courtesy to Mick.

It makes Allen look between them rapidly, though, with hope growing in his eyes even as his common sense tries to extinguish it.

"What you need to imagine," Len is explaining to Allen, "is if someone had the ability to create - let's call it a hologram, a duplicate, that looked and felt like your wife, except there's nothing really alive there. The only role it has is to die, and disintegrate within a few days -"

"I thought you said it was a hologram?"

"More like a temporary mannequin that they stick a hologram of your wife's face on," Len amends. "I know it sounds very sci-fi, but we're telling you that this technology exists, and that we have reason to think that it was used in your case."

"But you don't know anything about my case!"

"Knew that the knife was silver, didn't I?" Mick grunts. 

That shuts Allen right up, at least for a second. "No one knew that," he murmurs. "Not the papers, no one but the police..."

"We're not police," Len says, voice scathing. 

"We need to do something," Mick tells Len. "No one else can."

Len nods. "There's only one way," he warns. "She'll be kept Underhill. We need a fae-touched of her blood to guide us to the right demesne, and then we need to take her by right of conquest to make sure he doesn't take her back. And even then, he'll declare war on that which took and that which was taken."

Mick shrugs. The Gentlemen have been at war with him since he was a child, just for being born the way he was; that's good enough.

"We can take Allen, can't we?" he asks, but Len is already shaking his head in negation. "Why not?"

"His sentence hasn't been solemnized by the courts yet, but his imprisonment _has_ been - sentenced to prison to await trial, with bail denied, yeah?"

Henry nods.

"We need someone else. Do you have any other family that saw what happened? Family that's still free?"

"My - my son."

"That'll do. You need to delay your trial while we work, though - and _no_ plea bargains in the meantime."

Henry nods again, clearly overwhelmed by the power of Len and Mick's combined certainty. "I - are you sure? It _can't_ be true -" he starts, but Len holds up a hand.

"Delay your trial," he orders. "Leave the rest to us. Mick, how long are we in for?"

"Not long."

"Let's make it shorter."

With Len bright-eyed with iron-fever, burned down closer to his true self shining through his human flesh, putting the full force of his energy behind it, getting out early on good behavior is pretty easy.

Humanity recognizes the Others among them, when they're not well hidden, and the fear of them is buried deep in the blood. No one wants to keep the strange, piercing eyes of the Leonard Snart anywhere near them a second longer than they have to, when he bends his will upon them.

And once they're out, they track down the person they need.

"We're on behalf of your father," Mick tells the fae-touched boy who says his name is Barry Allen. "There's a chance your mother's not dead, and this is a mis- a mas-"

"A miscarriage of justice," Len says, offering up the words when they slip away from Mick's tongue. 

The boy stares at them. "You're trying to trick me," he accuses, but Mick can hear the hope in his voice.

"No, we ain't. You gonna help us or not?"

The boy nods. 

"Are we going to war?" Lisa asks, a golden figure swathed in shadows: the boy jumps, because she hadn't been there a moment before. "I like war."

"Conquest," Len says. "But yes, war. You in?"

"Like I would let my brother go to war without me. Do we have a name for the person who's been taken?"

They look at the boy. "Nora," he says. "Nora Allen."

"And you're her blood," Lisa says. Her teeth are very sharp as she smiles. "Good."

For all the time Mick's been with Len - and the time of it gets confused, he finds, with him being both older and younger than any calendar says he ought to be - he's never ventured beneath the Hill and beyond the stars, knowing that he would be a target beyond all targets for all those who reside there.

He goes now, with his allies at his side and his hand on the shoulder of a fae-touched boy seeking his stolen blood.

The way to that land lies through the beyond and betwixt of the worlds, and what that land is, when they enter it, is not something that be described in mere words, merely in visions: their party walks through the nameless forest of the many pools described by Lewis, find their rest and guidance in the sleeping corpse-city called by Lovecraft R’lyeh, and avoid Carroll's disappearing cat or Douglas' falling whale, each of which try to lure them onto a road made of the glittering gold of raw star-stuff envisioned by Baum. 

Above their heads, the quantum pathway splits even as they watch: an aurora borealis of the infinite, a million worlds that spiral outwards in shapes near and bizarre, and in many there are other people who were born of the same stuff as Mick, the same parents and the same home, and yet walk different paths with the same face: worlds where his family burned, worlds where he died with them, and even stranger, weirder worlds in which he is not even recognizably human.

Mick can see them all, if he looks.

Len might not have the claws he was born with, but his scratches do a very good job of keeping Mick from looking too long. 

The path they seek is carved from blood and promises made: a mother's promise to her son, and his to hers, and while such strings are easily broken without love to strengthen them, here there is no such difficulty. 

They find the demesne they seek, located in a popular district beyond the dark side of the moon, east of the spinning sun that watches all, its never-closing eye seeing in all directions at once. The demesne is old and well-guarded, showing the many signs of power and wisdom on walls that defy even understanding, and yet at the same time it is somehow - repulsive.

"Oath-breaker," Lisa hisses, her eyes glowing gold behind the warm brown glasses she has kept on as a courtesy to the mortals in her party. Mick sees the ghostly shape of wings mantling angrily behind her, and wonders exactly what it was that spelled a ring for him and joined his family. "Accursed!"

"Does that mean he's - uh - unseelie?" the boy asks, clutching onto Mick's arm. "Is that the right word? The bad type?"

"All words are right," Len says, and on him, too, Mick can see signs of rage that extend well beyond his human shape: and for him the shape is very, very large, ancient and massive beyond the human ken, the darkness and seeming emptiness of a vast mouth that laughs - and yet something of the shape suggested ears angrily pricked forward and raised hackles in a way that is unmistakably feline. "All words are wrong. Here is what _we_ call 'evil': that which breaches the truth that is all that binds the universe together."

The boy gulps. "I lie sometimes," he offers, a shy confession. "Just a little. Mostly to avoid people yelling at me. Is that bad?"

"Humans are born liars," Mick says with a shrug. "It's our gift and our right, and it's why the Gentlemen hate us all so. Don't worry about it. The Gentlemen are beyond our understanding: even what we see here now is just our brains trying to make sense of what can't be made sense of."

The boy nods, but his fingers tighten to the point of pain on Mick's arm. Mick permits it without complaint.

"I'll case the place," Len announces. "Lisa - watch them."

"Remember," Mick tells the boy. "Don't eat nor drink, and make no deals you don't mean to keep."

Len returns seven hours and one later, which feels to them like seconds passing, and yet it is a thousand years before he speaks to say, "She is there, and still human - for now."

"How do we get her back?" the boy demands.

"The guardian of the gates may be negotiated with," Len says. "And once past the gates, we can do the rest ourselves."

The guardian of the gate looks with rapacious eyes upon Mick's power, but before any of them can speak, the boy does: "What do you want in exchange for letting us in to rescue my mom, and out again with her?"

Mick glares at the boy, who shrugs at him. "You said no deals I don't mean to keep," he points out. "I mean to keep this one."

Mick - rendered mute by the onset of bilateral dealings - looks at Len beseechingly.

"I'll help," Len agrees.

Lisa throws up her hands in frustration: to promise aid for nothing is alien to her glittering heart, even to friends and loved ones.

With Len's help, though, the price is very nearly fair: the boy trades away his name, with a reprieve given until he is of age. 

"And he can still use it as a secondary identifier," Len insists. 

"Why?" the guardian asks blankly. "If it is not his?"

"Humans - you know how it is. I also insist that he have a window to reclaim it."

"Granted," the guardian agrees, voice pleasant and almost mechanical. "If he finds a way to give me service among the mortals, he may reclaim his name. Are we agreed?"

"We are," the nameless boy says, and shudders when it is taken from him for the briefest of moments, a skip of a star's pulse, and then returned with the weight of a security attached.

And in that split-second moment, when he was nameless and vulnerable, something slipped in –

Or tried to, anyway.

Mick catches it by its twisting twining tail, grasping lightning between his fingers and throwing it as far and as hard away as possible, and when it returns, hissing malevolently, it finds its pathway closed.

It retreats.

"The lightning has touched your essence," Len tells the wide-eyed boy. "It sought to conquer and failed: that is your victory, and it may seek to give you a gift in the future to dispel its debt. Be wary."

"But not too wary," Lisa adds, her eyes cutting to Mick in a way that uncomfortably reminds him of the favor she still owes him. "You still need to find a name before the lien on the one you bear is called in."

The boy nods. “But I get my mom now, right?”

“You get entrance and exit,” the guardian corrects. “The rest is up to you.”

“Let’s go,” Len says.

Nora Allen, first of her name in her line, is trapped in a room of wondrous pleasures: silks and satins, foods of all sorts, music and warmth. 

“Shit,” Mick says succinctly, looking around as the boy rushes towards her with cries of ‘Mother!’ and she catches him up into an embrace. “Hey, you - you didn’t eat anything, did you?”

“I’m not an idiot,” she says. “Born and raised in the slums of Central, thank you very much; we have enough wrong turns in hidden alleys to know the rules. You don’t eat any of the food that’s offered to you in the City Beneath, or you don’t ever go home.”

“If we don’t get out of here soon, it won’t matter what you do and do not eat,” Len says. 

“Your lover is in danger,” Lisa agrees. “And your life hangs in the balance.”

“Stop being so damn cryptic, both of you,” Mick says to them, then turning back to Nora, he tells her, “Your husband’s in jail because he’s been accused of killing you. If the court affirms that he did it, it’ll cut off your rights to return to the land Overhill.”

“Crap –”

“Mom!” the boy gasps.

“– I’d rather not be stuck in Central Below, all things considered,” she says, hugging her boy again. “Is –”

“No names!” Len interjects.

Mick steals a glance at her eyes and sees a pillar of strength in her: a foundation for something wonderful, if she is permitted to be. He sees how her life is tied in with her son’s: her death will choose which road he walks, the boy with the potential to change things, and to lose her will change things – not for the worse, since the Gentlemen don’t see things like that, but in a certain direction that this particular Gentleman, the oath-breaker, desires.

And, well, if an oath-breaker ruins lives for what he desires, then he deserves not to get it. 

“Let’s go,” Mick says. “Quickly.”

She gives them her hands, and they fly free.

The guardian lets them pass even as the alarms sound, and the storm clouds gather in the distance as the Gentleman returns home at top speed to see what has conquered his domain and what they’ve taken, but for all his speed he is too slow: they slip through a set of Doors, great and oaken and carven like in a children’s book Mick’s ma used to read them written by a woman named Cooper, and they’re returned to where they were.

“You need to get to the courts,” Len says to Nora Allen, his voice filled with urgency. “You need a knight at your side to protect you: your captor will come for you.”

“He means a lawyer,” Mick clarifies. “But go to the courthouse, it's one of the few places the Gentlemen can't enter – but be quick about it!” 

She goes, and the boy goes along with, though he falters, looking back at them. “Will I see you again?” he asks plaintively.

“Oh, to be sure,” Len says. “You aren’t out of the woods yet.”

Mick keeps an eye on them through the papers, all of which trumpet her miraculous return and her husband’s very nearly wrongful conviction, and when it all dies down he and Len track them down. 

The boy leaps forward and embraces Mick around the waist, which Mick had not been expecting. “Uh,” he says.

“You’re back!” the boy exclaims. 

“Yes. I – said I would be?”

“That was a month ago!”

“You were busy!”

Len is laughing at him. 

“You should come and meet my dad,” the boy says.

“I met him in prison,” Mick protests, but it’s no use. “And I met your ma Underhill, I don’t need to meet them…”

“We owe you our thanks,” Nora Allen says. 

“Don’t say owe like that,” Mick says sternly.

“You’re human,” she says archly. “It doesn’t count.”

“What am I, chopped liver?” Len asks, amused.

“Oh, I don’t know. A sidekick, maybe,” Nora teases.

“Oh, ouch,” he says. “Straight to the heart.”

Mick ignores them. “You’re being hunted,” he says flatly to them both, and they take him seriously – at least, Nora does, and Henry only has eyes for her. “He’s waiting for another try – he’s found a body, somewhere –”

Lisa reported he wasn’t Underhill anymore, so it was the only reasonable supposition as to where he went.

“– and he’ll keep going until he gets what he wants,” Mick concludes. "Which is got something to do with you, Nora, or maybe now just your boy, since he's the one who did the stealing."

“What do we do?” Nora asks.

“I’ve been thinking about that,” Mick says. “Way I see it, there’s a couple of options: your boy can do like me, and separate from his family –”

“No!” Henry exclaims.

“– or you can all hide away somewhere you won’t be found,” Mick concludes. 

“Where would that be?” Nora asks. “Hiding from one of the Walkers isn’t an easy skill to pick up, and not if they’re hunting you.”

“There’s a place out in Keystone,” Mick says. “The local public school’s only decent, but the science teachers were pretty good.”

“They won’t look for us there? What’s special about it?”

Mick thinks of a silver ring and grimaces. 

“It’s hiding something already,” Len says for him. “And secrets hide other secrets. Will you go?”

Nora and Henry look at each other. “We’ll go.”

“You’ll need to send your boy back to visit here regularly,” Len warns. “Separate from you, just to be safe. A month or so each year, at least; he needs the soil of his childhood to nourish him.”

“I need _soil_?” the boy asks, surprised. “I’m not a plant!”

“You’re only part human now,” Mick says, as gently as he can manage. “You need more than just what you needed before.”

The boy nods.

“We have a family friend that lives around here, who’ll take him in for the summers,” Henry says. “It’ll be fine – he’ll be fine, won’t he?”

“The Gentleman won’t touch him directly until he’s of age,” Len says confidently. Mick’s not sure why that’s the case, but if Len says so, he’ll believe him. “You should go soon.”

They’re gone within a week.

Mick hopes his parents like their new neighbors. 

“You know the war will be long,” Lisa observes when they return home and settle in on the couch in front of the fireplace. “He will lie in wait. He will not forget.”

“I know,” Mick says, and reaches out to run his hand over Len’s scalp the way he likes it best.

“He will summon allies,” Lisa says. “Lightning tails and metal-makers and ice sprites.”

“We’ll find something to use against them,” Mick says, smiling as Len purrs and lights a fire in the fireplace with a snap of his fingers for Mick’s watching pleasure. “Maybe guns or something.”

“He will summon the changeling courts,” Lisa warns. “Men and women who live outside the clutches of time: they will come after you.”

“Let them,” Mick says, his eyes drawn to the fire, seeing the terrible things he always sees deep within: the future, the past, and all of the world’s marvels. “We’ll deal with them.”

“And I still owe you that favor,” she says, pouting. 

“I know what I’ll ask you for,” he says, and sends her away.

And he does know, because he looks into the fire and sees the infinite ever-splitting sky of the Underhill there: recognizing his terrible visions for the first time. 

Now that he knows what it is that he’s looking at, he knows how to aim his vision.

He knows how to look _forward_. 

Mick knows now, as he didn’t before, that if he hadn’t saved Nora, her son would have grown up into a hero – he still will, of course, but now he will guard humanity and its laws both, rather than the laws alone. He will have his family to fall back on, a foundation built on the pillar of Nora’s strength, softened by Henry’s kindness and generosity, and he will be all the stronger for it. He will come to Mick and beg to learn of all that Mick knows, of the Gentlemen and the other worlds, and when he goes to fight, he will fight with Len and Mick at his side or snapping at his heels, depending on Len’s mood that day. He will be a marvel, their Flash will, when he is older, and he will steal the finest of the Gentleman’s human servants out from under his nose to join him, and the Gentlemen will learn to fear him as they fear Mick. 

Mick knows that he will be targeted by the Changeling Court, who go by many names: he knows one of their rogue agents will seek out his help, respectfully and with care and with honor for his reputation, and that poor Len will be treated as a mere plus-one, a fairy tag-along who lucked into something good, but that this cruelty will bounce off Len’s prideful nature in a way that it wouldn’t if the situation had been reversed, the way it would have been if he had done nothing. 

Mick knows that the great twisting of time that is called by some a Branch of the Great Tree, by others the Outstretched Hand, and by yet more by the deceptively simple name of the Oculus remains a fixed point in time, unchanging: so many Lens go there and meet their doom, for reasons and through ways unnumbered. Many return, but some don’t, and he doesn’t want his Len to be one of the ones that is lost, doesn’t want to be one of the ones who are bereaved and bereft, left alone a half of what was once whole.

He knows, too, that his Len cannot die by such ways.

He remembers the shadow of that great shape, that terrible laughing mouth that only thinks it was once a cat, or perhaps truly once was, long ago – he knows that he has a black hole curled up on his pillow the way that the black cats of the world only mimic in desperate yearning for what they once were. 

He knows, too, that when the Oculus explodes, his Len will go with it. Not to die, no, but to resume his original shape, stripped of all hints of mortality, the yawning void that knows only to destroy: the perfect servant to a King who still lusts after his power, and who Mick will fight until the day one of the two of them is defeated and killed, because Mick conquered the King’s property by stealing the heart the King never realized Len had, and the King will never forgive him for that. 

He knows that he will have to go to war against the King then, without Len to help him, because the King will throw everything he can bring to bear to try to recapture the servant he sees as his property, and he knows that he must start collecting allies now for that great and terrible battle.

So, yes, he knows what the future brings.

He knows what he has to gain. He knows what he has to lose.

And he knows, too, what price he will extract from Lisa if he wins the battle against Len’s sire and King, if he wins the right to reclaim his partner and soon-to-be bride, a price she will be freely willing to pay: his Len returned to his own shape and mind, seven years and a day from the day he disappeared, and to return him once more to Mick’s side for that long overdue wedding.

He can handle seven years.

Better seven years alone than a lifetime. 

And after that –

Well.

After that, the fun begins.

Mick looks into the fire, into the future, and smiles.


End file.
